BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

Curious what the motivation for this change is. Are there any actual changes or is it just legibility? (I did notice some of the special case rules, like Imperial Deferentials and The Traitor, are totally gone)

There’s a couple of very small changes aimed mostly at clarity (for example, the paragraph on what can be included in an AA is now a bulleted list) or enabling this change ( as in Rule 1.1).

The intent is just to make the ruleset a much less imposing doc than it currently is; for new players I think that it is confusing and overwhelming, and most of its contents are not needed for people who just want to play the game. Nothing has been taken out; clarifications and edge-case provisions have just been shunted into the Appendix document.

No Special Case rules were taken out; this change just makes active SC rules be in the main ruleset and inactive ones be in the Appendix.

ah okay. that makes sense. so its mostly just farming less important stuff off into an appendix document that is still game state but not as imposing?

Exactly. Shouldn’t be any substantive difference to the text or the way it works in practice.

“Active Special Case rules can be found in the Appendix.”

That’ll need to get fixed in the Appendix. (In theory you can edit the appendix rules, then still edit your post within the two hour limit)

“When a DoV is Enacted, all other pending DoVs are Failed, the gamestate and ruleset are upheld, and a new Dynasty begins in which the Monk who made the DoV becomes the Abbot.”

I am a bit concerned by this change. Can we leave it out?

In theory, a rogue admin can enact a DoV and bam, its enacted, everything is upheld, they just won.

Even a non malicious admin can miss the rule that the abbot has to vote on a DoV to pass it in 12 hours and accidentally enact something, and boom, its valid.

did a pass with a diff tool, everything else looks good but someone else should also check

Thanks for giving this a proper pass.

You’re right about the upholding of DoVs; it would at best create a huge problem where a win was upheld but still against Fair Play, and that seems ghastly, so best thrashed out another day. I’ve taken it out.

I’ve also fixed the active/inactive thing.

Links in the main post should be updated.

Was taking a final look before casting a for vote.

I still have some concerns as to what counts as the “Ruleset” and what counts as the “Ruleset Appendix”

The fact that we have to specify “The Ruleset, Ruleset Appendix and Gamestate can only be altered in manners specified by the Ruleset” seems to imply that the Ruleset Appendix is not the ruleset.

We know the Ruleset Appendix is “ruletext” but that is different.

I unfortunately think we need further clarification that any references to the Ruleset also apply to the Ruleset Appendix. Sorry I didn’t catch this sooner

@Clucky I don’t think they should be grouped under the same term. I don’t think that there’s any benefit to it; the Appendix being ruletext is sufficient to ensure that it carries equal legal weight, and grouping both documents under one term means that it’s cumbersome at best to refer to only the document that I would style as the ruleset in isolation. Consider “If a Special Case Rule is included in this section of the Appendix then it is inactive. Active Special Case rules can be found in the Ruleset”, for example.

The light green hurts my eyes a bit.

I preferred the more professional theme too instead of these somewhat childish bubbles but aside from that, I like this.

I think splitting the ruleset into two documents is a mistake; it’ll make it harder to find rules by Ctrl-F-searching the ruleset for relevant words, and having a second “extra” ruleset
(hidden behind an overlookable “there exists a separate document”) makes the game feel more opaque.

It ties into the same disagreement that comes up over Mentoring, in that one of the strengths of BlogNomic is that it is basically one big rule document - we don’t roll our eyes at newcomers and say “no, Mentorship is an informal system, that’s why you can’t find a rule for it”, and it would be a shame to have to start saying “no, you need to read the other ruleset to see that ‘weekly’ has a defined meaning”.

On a line-by-line diff, this falls at the first repeal: by removing “Dynasties” from the main ruleset, a player reading the rules from the top down will have no idea what a dynasty is, nor any hint that the other document will explain it. It’s not much better at present (we’re still using the term before it’s introduced), but if our goal is to write an accessible ruleset we need something that flows coherently. (The Context Stack approach to rule writing might be a useful one to apply here.)

The colour scheme on my sandbox there was just a quick sketch to judge whether recolouring the ruleset could successfully convey “core/dynastic/special are important, appendix is boring” - I didn’t put that much thought into choosing the colours or design. It’d be good if we could somehow get across the idea that dynastic rules were the mutable ones.

I’m definitely behind the idea of making the ruleset a more accessible read. I’d say the best solution would be to keep it in one document, refactor the rules to make them more readable from the top down, use some sort of colour scheme to convey which sections are important, and add a box of intro text to each section saying “This is the Appendix, and it…” to give the reader context on how they’re expected to view it.